Final Fantasy has been neutered and reduced to only a shadow of its former self.
When you first start the game you'll notice fantastic graphics and some great artwork that really help set the stage for a thrilling ride, unfortunately the ride never quite gets started because of major faults that are just downright inexplicable leaving me to contemplate what exactly Square-Enix was trying to accomplish with this game.
The most notable of these faults is the incredible linear aspect they've adopted. It's obvious they're trying to dumb the series down somewhat in order to reach a wider range of demographic, but at what cost? Alienating long standing fans of the series? Let me put it into perspective of exactly how linear this game is. For the first 10 hours of the game your stuck in small corridors sitting through tutorial after tutorial. Absolutely no exploration is required. You simply look at your mini-map and follow the yellow markers finding spheres{the games equivalent of treasure chests) along the way. Even after the tutorial are complete you're still stuck running in laughably small environments with only one way to go.
You want shops and towns? Forget about that, because instead you have a magical shopping function at each save point. Now don't get me wrong, Final Fantasy has never really had a very deep leveling system, but this takes virtually any depth they may of had in previous installments and flushed it down the toilet. You have 3 very basic stat categories, and your HP replenish after each and every battle. Instead of leveling up you have a Crystalarium system similar to the sphere grip from Final Fantasy 10, but much worse.
You have the ability to shift paradigms which effectively alters the role of your characters in battle. Obviously just a lazy way so you don't have to control any other party members. Most annoying though, is that once your main party leader dies, it's game over. You have no option to take control of another character, no option to revive that person even though you may have 50 phoenix downs. It's just game over.
The story is downright atrocious, and trying to follow whats going on makes it even worse. They do have a story summary option you can read in the menu, which is nice, but the story is so bad that you find yourself not really caring what's going on anyways. Horrible character development and laughable dialog don't help either. Every character is annoying and uninspired leaving you no real reason to care about what happens to them. Vanille sounds British half the time and the other half of the time she just sounds like she's mildly retarded. How's this for a character idea? We'll make a black guy with a bird living in his afro...awesome. /sarcasm
Sadly, this is probably the last Final Fantasy game I'll play. Thanks Square-Enix for turning your back on all of your long standing fans.